I like this thought from Andrew Crow, head of design at Uber, on the difference between being scrappy and shipping scrappy:
There’s no such thing as minimal viable quality. Each product iteration must stem from a principled approach of creating great experiences regardless of scale or milestone. If it’s a mockup, the level of fidelity typically indicates the level of “doneness”. If it’s a prototype, the level of detail needs to be appropriately matched to the sophistication of the hypothesis you’re testing. If it’s an MVP, the quality put into the product must be at a level that results in the maximum learning for that stage of development. The quality of product you finally ship reflects the caliber of your company and is a measure of the respect you have for your customer.
I think of this as being thoughtful. Every interaction you design should be made with care and respect for the user’s time and attention. Details make design and there isn’t a detail too small to pay attention to.
As Andrew points out, not spending the time and attention on details at early stages can be detrimental in unexpected ways as it might provide you with bad data back on usage (ultimately design choices and brand effect experiences). I think there’s an important lesson here that most people don’t consider (and came up in the old brand vs utility debate). Ultimately things like brand, utility, and design in products are entirely too closely coupled to disconnect. In fact, utility is actually a measure of the relative satisfaction a person gets from consuming something. Since satisfaction is about how much something fulfills your expectations, the utility and brand are inextricably linked.
December 8, 2014 // This post is about: Brand, design, marketing, Utility
Lately I’ve been talking a lot about Elon Musk’s idea of first principles thinking (finding the atomic unit of a challenge and building up from there) and I decided to write a bit about it over at Medium. Here’s a snippet about how it applies to working with designers:
What’s interesting, though, is I think you can apply it beyond just big problems to almost any challenge a company or product faces. I gave a talk at our recent DesignTalk event about how to work best with designers. I think encouraging designers to be first principles thinkers is key to getting the best work possible. By this I mean the best way to work with a talented designer is to define the core components of the problem and let them solve up from there. Encourage them to throw away existing solutions and instead solve the problem in a way that best suits the unique issues faced in this case. While the end solution might resemble something else that exists, by not applying analogical thinking you at least know that you’ve arrived at it because it is the best, not because it already exists.
April 27, 2014 // This post is about: design, First principles, leadership, product
After it started raining I decided to redesign my blog. There wasn’t much reason other than looking for a fun project to work on and finding the old version increasingly tough on the eyes (plus terrible on the phone). The new version is simpler, responsive for mobile, and has bigger fonts (for whatever that’s worth).
I’d like to say this means I’m going to write more, but that doesn’t seem all that likely. I mean I’ll do my best (and have the last few days), but it’s amazing how often life gets in the way of blogging. One of the amazing things about RSS feeds and email subscriptions, though, is that it doesn’t really matter how frequently I actually update this thing because you’ll hear about it. For what it’s worth I’ve also got a Twitter feed for new posts from the blog at @NoahBrier.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is that it feels like there’s a big opportunity for blogs again. While everything has gotten shorter, it’s left a pretty wide door open for folks who want to write thoughtful stuff. I think it’s why we’ve seen thoughtful bloggers ascend quickly (someone like Horace at Asymco comes to mind). Again, not sure that means I’ll write more, but it certainly feels like a good time to be doing so.
July 14, 2013 // This post is about: blogging, design, redesign
I wrote a post over at 99U about the levels of designers and how I think you build a great design team. You can read the whole thing there, but here’s a snippet about states:
If level two comes naturally to most designers who have grown up in a digital world, level three most definitely does not. States are about understanding all the different possible outcomes of a given task within a product and being able to design for all of them. Things like errors are obvious, albeit often forgotten, while actions like escapes and backs are much less frequently planned for.
To draw a parallel, a great engineer thinks in states. Before they write a line of code they have come to understand all the different outcomes and use that understanding to design a fault-resistant system. One of my favorite lines from one of our engineers recently was, “when I start typing the work’s done.”
June 5, 2013 // This post is about: business, design, Entrepreneur, percolate
I really like situations that help describe the fact that lots of factors ultimately go into the way you feel about a brand/design/marketing. I wrote a bit about how Jony Ive feels about it last week and I thought this was another interesting example from a very different place. In the early 90s a designer named Alexander Juilian was given the opportunity to redesign the UNC Tarheels basketball uniform. He was a huge Tarheels fan and thus felt a ton of pressure to deliver something amazing. Not wanting to leave things to chance, he looped Michael Jordan into the decision (Jordan, at the time, was just starting his ascent to the greatest player in the history of the NBA but he was already UNC royalty). Ultimately Julian sent all the designs to Jordan to let him sign off on his favorite:
“And guess what? As soon as Michael [Jordan] said that [the argyle design was his favorite], then the entire team also liked the argyle best. So we made the first uniform in Michael’s size, sent it to Chicago, he worked out in it, then we sent it down to Chapel Hill. There was near frenzy, I’m told, in the locker room as to who was going to be the first Carolina player to put it on after Michael because they wanted Michael’s mojo. Hubert Davis (photo, above right) won, he was the same size and he was the model. Now he’s a great sportscaster.
May 22, 2013 // This post is about: Alexander Julian, basketball, design, marketing, Michael Jordan, tarheels
